Terry Riley in Concert – Monday, October 3, 2005

Listen to a sample of Terry Riley's music!

Santa Fe New Music proudly presented the only area appearance of the legendary California composer, Terry Riley, Monday, October 3 at 8:00 p.m. at the Lensic Performing Arts Center in Santa Fe.

California Composer Terry Riley was one of the composers who launched what is now known as the Minimalist movement with his revolutionary classic In C in 1964. This seminal work provided a new concept in musical form based on interlocking repetitive patterns. Its impact was to change the course of 20th Century music, and it’s influence has been heard in the works of prominent composers such as Steve Reich, Philip Glass and John Adams and in the music of rock groups such as The Who, The Soft Machine, Tangerine Dream, Curved Air, and many others. Terry’s hypnotic, multi-layered, polymetric, brightly orchestrated, Eastern-flavored improvisations and compositions set the stage for the prevailing interest in a New Tonality.

In 1970, Terry became a disciple of the revered North Indian Raga Vocalist Pandit Pran Nath and made the first of his numerous trips to India to study with the Master. He appeared frequently in concert with the legendary singer as tampura, tabla and vocal accompanist over the next 26 years until Pran Nath’s passing in 1996.

While teaching at Mills College in Oakland in the 1970’s he met David Harrington, founder and leader of the Kronos Quartet. Thus began a long association that has so far produced over 13 string quartets, a quintet, Crows Rosary, a concerto for string quartet entitled The Sands which was the Salzburg Festival’s first ever new music commission, and, in 2003, Sun Rings, the multi-media piece for choir, visuals and space sounds, commissioned by NASA. Most recently Riley has completed The Cusp of Magic, for string quartet and pipa. Cadenza on the Night Plain was selected by both Time and Newsweek as one of the ten Best Classical Albums of the year. The epic five quartet cycle, Salome Dances for Peace was selected as the #1 Classical Album of the Year by USA Today and was nominated for a Grammy.

Riley’s innovative first orchestral piece Jade Palace was commissioned by Carnegie Hall for its centennial celebration in 1990/91. It was premiered there by Leonard Slatkin and the St. Louis Symphony. June Buddhas, for Chorus and Orchestra, based on Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues was commissioned by the Koussevitsky Foundation in 1991. The Rova Saxophone Quartet, the Arte Saxophone Quartet, Array Music, Zeitgeist, Stephen Scott’s Bowed Piano Ensemble, the California E.A.R. Unit, guitarist David Tanenbaum, the Assad Brothers, Cello Conjunto, the Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio, pianist Werner Bartschi and the Amati Quartet are some of the performers and ensembles who have commissioned and performed his works. From 1989 to 1993 he formed and led the ensemble Khayal to perform works written for them. He subsequently formed The All Stars and the Vigil Band. He regularly performs solo piano concerts of his works from the past 30 years. He also appears in duo concerts with Indian Sitarist Krishna Bhatt, saxophonist George Brooks, guitarist Gyan Riley and especially with virtuoso Italian double bassist, Stefano Scodanibbio. In 1992, he formed the small theater company, The Travelling-Avantt-Gaard to perform the chamber opera The Saint Adolf Ring based on the divinely mad drawings, poetry, writings and mathematical calculations of Adolf Woelfli, an early 20th century Swiss Artist who suffered from schizophrenia and created his entire output over a 35 year span while confined in a mental institution. Riley continues work on a set of 24 pieces for guitar and guitar ensemble called The Book of Abbeyozzud, and has recently completed a book of five pieces for piano, four hands. In 1999 he was commissioned by the Norwich Festival to compose a new work, What the River Said, which toured Britain with the UK based group, Sounds Bazaar featuring the great drupad vocalist Amelia Cuni. Then followed a commission from the Kanagawa Foundation in Yokohama to create an evening-length work for solo piano in microtonal tuning, The Dream, which received simultaneous premieres in Rome and in Yokohama performed by the composer.

The new millennium began with a tour of a new band, Terry Riley and the All Stars which included George Brooks, saxophones, Tracy Silverman, violin and six-string viola, Gyan Riley, guitar and Stefano Scodanibbio, double bass, with the final concert launching the first “New Sounds Live” concert of the 21st Century at Merkin Hall. Banana Humberto 2000, a piano concerto, was written for and performed many times by the composer with the Paul Dresher Ensemble. A new solo cello piece entitled Olde English was commissioned by legendary artist Bruce Conner and premiered by former Kronos Quartet cellist Jean Jeanrenaud. Music for a new staging of Michael McClure’s play, Josephine the Mouse Singer was written for a run in February 2001 at San Francisco’s SomArts Theater.

In 2004, Riley and McClure released their first collaborative album, I Like Your Eyes Liberty. In May of 2000, Riley made his first tour of Russia with solo piano concerts at the Sergei Kuryokin Festival in Saint Petersburg and at the Moscow Conservatory and the Dom, a privately run contemporary music club. The review of these concerts in Izvestia proclaimed “Terry Riley to be the greatest composer-pianist since Prokofief.” He has scored three feature films and has made music for numerous short films, including those of Bruce Conner. In 2003 his plans for the new Time Lag Accumulator were realized and constructed for the Festival of Lille. This nine-room mirrored structure with multi time delays was modeled on the original Time Lag Accumulator assembled in 1968 for the Magic Theatre Show at the Nelson Atkins Gallery in Kansas City. The new TLA will reside at the museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon, France. Riley was listed in the London Sunday Times as “one of the 1000 makers of the 20th Century.”